


Stranded

by syrupwit



Series: lightning strikes! [2]
Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Body Image, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Future Fic, Internalized Homophobia, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mental Health Issues, No Underage Sex, alien flower genitalia, brief mind control not related to sexual activity, references to involuntary hospitalization
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:28:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24914620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: A haunted workplace, a recovering friendship, the terror of impending adulthood: Gretchen had enough on her plate before aliens got involved.
Relationships: Dib/Zim (Invader Zim), Gaz/Gretchen/Tak (Invader Zim)
Series: lightning strikes! [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1531151
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	Stranded

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks very much to Aarin, Rue, and D. for their beta services, and to everyone on the Discord for their brainstorming help. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that there is no sexual content in this chapter. It's going to happen later.

In life, one’s expectations are often subverted. Cracks appear in assumptions long held evident. Mental and physical illness interfere with the ability to carry out standard activities, or are revealed to have distorted it for years without detection. Money is lost; utilities break; courses of career and study change or fail. Once-solid friendships fall apart, and time or circumstance defeats relationships around whose persistence serious ventures had been planned. 

The future cannot be anticipated. The past is reinvented from instant to instant, reinterpreted and repurposed as the mind integrates new information. To know anything, truly, can only be done in the moment—the lowest common denominator of human experience, one individual experiencing insight for a second’s unquantifiable fraction. That civilizations have built anything to last on this wobbly, fragile foundation is itself incredible. But we must leave that behind; we are here to discuss other things. Namely, the events of one summer, and their significance not only to a single human’s life, but to the fate of several galaxies. 

* * *

Gretchen had not wanted to work at the old bowling alley. If she’d had her way, she would have stayed at school for the summer and found a work-study job, but her parents had insisted she come home. It was the first time she had been home in nearly a year. At the end of her long, delay-ridden journey, riding the city bus after midnight, she had peered at the smog-veiled stars with a dangerous sort of tenderness in her heart and felt like a real adult. 

The feeling fled at breakfast the next morning and had not returned since. Gretchen was an only child and got along well with her parents, but a mere ten and a half months of freshman core courses and innovative Cup-O-Noodle dinners had not changed her much in their eyes from the timid honors student they knew. So Gretchen was left to figure out the difference herself, if there even was one.

The bowling alley had existed since before she was born. That it had managed to stay in business this long was a wonder in itself, but rumor also held that it was haunted. Perhaps Gretchen shouldn’t have been surprised when she showed up for her walk-in interview—her father had seen an ad in the paper and pushed her to apply, and she hadn’t had any other plans—and was greeted at the front counter by Dib Membrane, greasy and recalcitrant in a patterned camp shirt.

Gretchen and Dib hadn’t spoken since two weeks before high school graduation, when she had gotten him involuntarily committed to the Crazy House for Boys for getting up on a desk and screaming about Zim’s imminent murder. It was the type of trespass that friendships seldom recovered from. If Gretchen had known the extent of Dib’s ordeal in the Crazy House, she would have been too ashamed to proceed with her interview. But she did not know what Dib had faced in his stay there, and thus she was able to request a written application, fill it out on one of the low benches lining the foyer, and wait twenty minutes for the bowling alley owner to call her into his office.

The owner was a compact man in his fifties who went by Joshua T. Pineapple. He had piercing eyes of no discernable color and liked to talk about the free market. Gretchen impressed him by nodding along with his progressively less coherent opinions. He liked that she was too homely to cause problems—there had been a summer several years ago, Gretchen would learn, when a romantic dispute between employees had nearly shuttered the business—and took her open schedule as a sign of her serious character rather than her inability to hold onto local friends. She walked out of the interview with a job. 

So, yes, she hadn’t wanted to work at the bowling alley, but it turned out that it wasn’t so bad. Business was slow, customers were few, and the unusual operating hours gave Gretchen an excuse to turn down any bored people from high school who wanted to catch up. Mr. Pineapple rarely left his office when he was there, leaving his employees to fend with the occasional busload of tourists or vanful of assisted living residents, but that meant Gretchen could sneak books to work. Dib barely talked to her at first, but that meant she got more reading done. Air conditioning worked inconsistently throughout the building—the foyer and front counter area were glacial, the arcade close and sweaty, the snack bar and player seating areas livable, and the lanes so chilled that she could almost see her breath in the air—but it was nothing she couldn’t alleviate with a jacket or an undone top button. The pipes rattled, the ancient bowling animations played endlessly on their contemporary television screens, and various other parts of the building made strange noises throughout the day, but altogether there was nothing that struck her as too far out of the ordinary. At least, until she saw the ghost.

The bowling alley was absolutely haunted. Once Dib started speaking to Gretchen again, he never shut up about it. Gretchen had some experience with ghosts already, as her basement had been haunted for a decade by the spirit of a chinchilla. Yet the spooky chirping noises and infrequent electrical outages she had experienced did not prepare her for this encounter. 

The incident occurred on a Sunday in late May around five o’clock in the afternoon. Gretchen had been taking out the trash, as she did every Sunday starting at 4:45. Unless they hosted a birthday party or some other kind of large outing, it was unnecessary to take the trash out more than once a week. Gretchen had developed a route to maximize this task’s efficiency. She was about halfway done when she ran out of replacement trash bags.

There were no trash bags in the supply closet near Mr. Pineapple's office, so she decided to head down to the basement and see if there were any stored away, hoping she wouldn’t have to buy more at the corner store. Gretchen didn’t like going to the corner store during the workday. It interrupted her flow.

Double doors next to the arcade led down a sloping corridor to the basement. Gretchen flicked on the lights and searched the area. Neither the boiler room, the utilities closet, nor the set of steel shelves on one end yielded any trash bags. The fuse box and circuit breaker hid no secret stash. Gretchen had half resigned herself to a shopping trip when she saw a door she’d never noticed before.

It was behind one of the shelves. The shelving unit was crooked, like someone had pushed it hastily to cover the door. Gretchen didn’t stop to consider why. She tried the door handle, and it yielded. She peered inside.

She was standing on the threshold of a large, dim room. Faint shapes glinted in the darkness. After a moment, she realized that these were abstract paintings on the walls of a maze. As her eyes continued to adjust, she perceived that the room stretched almost impossibly far. She searched for a light switch, found one, and—

“Gosh!” said Gretchen. 

It was a laser tag arena. The switch she had flipped controlled a set of blacklights, which flooded the twisting maze walls with neon color. The arena had to be at least the size of the bowling alley, potentially larger. Gretchen blinked, tested a different switch, and the trippy blacklight was exchanged for plain old fluorescence. 

She took a couple of steps inside, hesitant to venture far. If she’d been more given to fancy, she might have assumed that she was drugged or hallucinating, but this strange room felt very real. The concrete floor was dusty and unfinished, swept with cobwebs along the walls. Examined up close, the paint was spotty and faded, cracking in places. Were it not for some Dib-sized boot prints and a scattering of candy wrappers, she would have thought the place abandoned, a failed project from the 90s that Mr. Pineapple had simply never told her about. She mentally prepared for an awkward conversation with Dib.

Then she heard someone crying.

It came softly at first. Faint, like the licking of rain at a window. When Gretchen discerned it, her hair stood on end. But she pushed forward anyway, seeking the source.

“Hello?” she called. “Is someone there?”

She turned a corner, froze, and screamed. So did the specter crouched there, livid and white, its goggling eyes picked out as starkly as its blood-smeared mouth. It screamed, and Gretchen screamed again, and then they both screamed, and then she sort of fainted or something. This was embarrassing. She had never fainted before.

By the time Dib arrived, toting too much parapsychology equipment and a roll of (heavy, weapon-worthy) foil from the kitchen, the ghost was gone.

* * *

After that, it was easy to return to their friendship. Events of the past weren’t forgiven or even discussed, but they both seemed more comfortable ignoring that. Gretchen was surprised to find her old crush on Dib almost totally vanished. Though hints of it cropped up initially, it was hard to idealize someone she balanced a cash register with. Time at school had introduced her to a broader selection of nerds; Dib, once her foremost example of a weird kid who was also smart and obsessive and debatably tormented, now joined a throng of tabletop RPG modders and people who broke down emotionally over mathematics concepts. But she still liked him, and he found her a tolerable companion.

On days when the trickle of customers dried to nothing, they even worked as a team to investigate the basement maze. Dib conducted this work alone more often, but he would also dart upstairs at times to update Gretchen on new evidence or bounce ideas off her. She didn’t always know how to respond, but he didn’t seem to mind.

May rolled into June. The temperature rose. The weather sweetened and then turned, like an overripe fruit. Gretchen still walked to work—it wasn’t far—but she started to bring a change of shirts. Those first steps into the bowling alley from outside, the feeling of chilled air through sweat-damp clothing, became one of her favorite moments of the day.

As July loomed, though, she grew restless. Part of it was the heat—few enjoy those inland California summers—but there was also a sense of anticipation, preparation, the arrival of a formless something that she couldn’t predict yet still knew was going to happen. It was an old feeling, and one that had never led to anything but anxiety. She resigned herself to a repeat of the same.

But it was on one of those days that Gretchen’s life changed. 

The bowling alley was open from noon to nine, every day but Sunday. Dib worked from noon to seven-thirty. Gretchen worked from three to nine, closing time not included. She took a break around seven. On this particular day it was about half past six, and Gretchen’s shift was crawling along. There were no customers, and the fantasy novel she’d just gotten at the library had turned out to be rather dry. Dib was down in the basement maze, where ectoplasm had begun oozing from an electrical outlet. She looked forward to his return and her break.

Dib’s younger sister Gaz visited him at work regularly. Prior to this job, Gretchen’s awareness of Gaz had been limited to schoolyard encounters and a few conversations in the aftermath of the Crazy House incident. During the latter time, Gaz had once let Gretchen inside her house to drop off some homework for Dib, and had stood by for a full five minutes while Gretchen made awkward small talk with her robot chef. It was the longest time they’d been in the same place until this summer.

Gretchen always felt nervous around her. Gaz angered easily, though she had not yet turned her frustration on Gretchen, and she had an attitude of knowing but detached impatience that made Gretchen fear looking naive or overearnest in comparison. She also perceived far more than she paid outward attention to, an uncanny quality. Unless she was playing games in the arcade, Gaz was usually glued to her phone, and somehow she still seemed to see and hear everything. 

Today the phone was not in sight. When she burst through the bowling alley entrance, startling Gretchen from her novel, Gaz was all there.

“Where’s Dib?” Gaz demanded.

“Um,” said Gretchen. Dib insisted that their paranormal investigation be kept secret from Gaz. Though it had been a few weeks by now, Gretchen’s on-the-spot excuses for him weren’t getting any better. 

“Did he ditch you again? That asshole.” Gaz looked mad.

“No, he’s”—Gretchen thought fast—“at the store? We ran out of… napkins. At the snack bar.” Dib had taken quite a lot of napkins to gather ectoplasm samples.

“Which store?” Gaz glanced around like she was going to walk back out and find him.

“He didn’t say.”

“He’s probably out chasing a yeti or something.” Gaz crossed her arms, exerting a distracting effect on her chest. Today she wore a camisole with wire-thin straps, whose built-in shelf bra could hardly rise to its task. 

As the summer heat wave stretched on, Gaz’s array of baggy t-shirts had been replaced with increasingly smaller tops. From hip to heel she was invariably shrouded in black, but from the breast-line upward she was likely to violate all but the most permissive dress codes. Which wasn’t relevant, because she was only about a year younger than Gretchen, but still.

Gaz was fascinatingly curvy, with the sort of effortless figure that Gretchen could never in a million years achieve without shapewear, and the push of soft fat at her midriff only served to make her more attractive. Not that she cared, of course. Gaz only cared about video games, food, and holding Dib responsible for his failures, in addition to whatever she was so worked up over today. Speaking of. 

“— _told_ him, it was just a guy who got stuck in a freezer. I swear, it’s like talking to a brick wall. Whatever. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll tell him you stopped by,” said Gretchen.

“Thanks,” said Gaz, heading for the door. Halfway there, she paused and turned back. “I didn’t mean that you were like a brick wall. I meant, like, Dib.”

“He’s gotten better,” said Gretchen, though it was scarcely true. Gaz laughed and left.

She came back twice that evening and again at closing, right after Dib had left. Sometimes Dib stayed until closing even though he was off the clock. He and Gretchen had invented the lie that he was practicing to audition for a bowling league. They’d had fun coming up with stupid names for it, although Gaz had never asked. Gretchen still held a vague ambition to make t-shirts.

Gaz was agitated now. From her perspective, Dib had gone AWOL. She’d been unable to reach him by text; his phone, though a Membrane Labs custom model, got zero reception in the basement. The ectoplasm had given him a great deal of trouble, and he’d been in such a hurry to test the few samples he captured that he was unlikely to check any messages until after he got to the lab. Gretchen tried to explain this to Gaz, using as much detail as she could, but none of it appeared to soothe her.

“I’m going to dismember him,” she told Gretchen, who was locking up at this point. Mr. Pineapple was gone—neither Dib nor Gretchen ever saw him leave—and the quiet day meant that closing made quick work.

“I feel like that’s something you shouldn’t tell me?” said Gretchen, struggling with the front door chain. 

“They’ll never find his body anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” Gaz was fidgeting, playing with her jewelry. She kept looking at the sky. 

“That’s ominous.”

“Trust me, whatever you’re imagining is merciful.” Gaz said things like this a lot. Gretchen was never sure how serious she was.

At last Gretchen succeeded in her task. She waved to Gaz and started the walk home while Gaz got in her car. Usually Gaz offered Gretchen a ride when they were in this situation, but today she was too concerned with Dib to bother. Gretchen didn’t mind. She liked being outside at night. The distance to her home was short enough, and the area quiet enough, that she could daydream as she walked. On days like today, when nothing happened at the bowling alley and she sat through her shift instead of standing, it was nice to get some exercise before bed.

It was a pleasant night. Enough time had passed since sundown for the air to cool significantly, but the pavement was still warm. The lawns sang with crickets. Rabbits ran through vacant lots. Sprinkler runoff trickled through drainage tunnels. With the new moon, the sky was a rich, dark blue, and pinprick stars were visible through the smog. Gretchen found herself glancing upward, enjoying their faint light. She began a fantasy about driving to the desert for a meteor shower. 

As Gretchen walked on, obsessively budgeting food and gas for a weekend trip, she saw a shooting star. It streaked down suddenly, a bright line angled at the horizon, before it blinked off like a flashlight. The image fit her mental narrative so gratifyingly that she went to bed still reeling with delight.

If she had known what that shooting star really meant, or why the earth where it had landed seemed to glow, she would not have rejoiced. If she had felt even an inkling of the trials before her, she might not have been able to sleep. But Gretchen, fortunately, was a normal human being, and that night she slept like a rock.

* * *

There was a short goth girl outside the corner store. She didn’t have a sign or a clipboard or anything; she was just standing there. Waiting. Gretchen gave her a kind look as she went in. The girl didn’t smile back.

Gretchen gathered hot fries, canned iced tea, and an energy drink for Dib. He’d promised to pay her twice the usual price for one. She suspected that the robot chef was trying to wean him off caffeine again. It was probably bad to indulge him, but a jumpy, twitchy Dib was preferable to one who wouldn’t stop whining about his headache, so… Oh man, she was totally enabling him. Maybe she should give him the iced tea instead.

Gretchen glanced out the window while she stood in line. Some guy was talking to the goth girl. He had a lit cigarette and looked like a douche. As Gretchen watched with increasing discomfort, the guy edged into the girl’s space, moving to touch her shoulder with his free hand—

Gretchen’s own shoulder was tapped by the person behind her. “Are you in line?” 

“Er, yes,” said Gretchen, and stepped forward to make her purchases. She did have to go to work.

When she stepped outside, the man was gone. The girl was still there, sitting against the wall with her knees pulled to her chest. A ground-up cigarette lay at her feet.

“Are you okay?” Gretchen asked. “It seemed like that guy was bothering you.”

It took a few moments for the girl to respond, like she hadn’t realized that Gretchen was talking to her even though Gretchen was standing right in front of her. She had flat, hard, oddly-colored eyes, and when she spoke she blinked very slowly, like a lizard.

“He took care of himself.”

“That’s, uh.” Now that she had the girl’s attention, Gretchen didn’t want it. “That’s good.”

The girl didn’t reply, but she watched Gretchen closely as she left, a mean twist to her black-painted lips. The weight of her gaze was unsettling. Gretchen forgot all about it as soon as she turned the corner. Somewhere in the distance, she heard sirens.

* * *

Gretchen ended up selling Dib his energy drink, although she felt guilty when Gaz caught him with it later. Gaz was furious with Dib. Business as usual, except there was a strange tinge of desperation to her anger. She kept ambushing Dib in corners and subjecting him to whisper-shrieked conversations that cut off as soon as Gretchen entered hearing range. When a group of sloppy-drunk bachelorettes arrived, demanding nachos—who brought their bachelorette party to a suburban bowling alley at seven p.m. on a Thursday?—it was almost a relief.

* * *

The girl was outside the corner store again the next day. Gretchen froze when she spotted her, and the girl shot her a little mocking smile, so swift she could have imagined it.

Gretchen kept her head down while she walked into the store, but the girl didn’t say anything as she passed by. Gretchen intended to buy napkins. The snack bar was out of napkins for real now—last night’s bachelorettes had made up a “dinner game” that used all but the last of them—and Mr. Pineapple promised to reimburse her by Friday if she bought some today. Or, at least, that was how she interpreted his text. Mr. Pineapple texted like it was still 1999 and each letter cost a dollar. Perhaps, for him, it did.

Gretchen bought too many overpriced napkins and steeled herself to pass the girl again. But she was gone. The parking lot was empty. She could continue on her route in peace.

It was an average day in early July. The weather was hot, but not bakingly hot. The sky was dull and grayish, smudged with pale clouds. Gretchen, hurrying to make her shift, was just starting to regret not buying a plastic bag when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

“Agh!” she said, and whirled around, flinging napkins everywhere. The girl laughed. It was a weirdly high-pitched laugh, even for someone as short as her. Gretchen forced herself to imagine that she had been teased for it. 

“What do you want?” she said, as coolly as she could manage.

The girl laughed again—she was probably teased a _lot,_ there was no reason for Gretchen to hate the sound of that laugh so much—and stepped closer. “Just keep your eyes on me…”

She could never remember what happened next.

* * *

“Where were you?” Dib was either worried or incredibly annoyed.

“I’m sorry, there was… Something came up.” Gretchen wasn’t sure what exactly had come up, but something had. And now she was an hour late. 

Dib smiled, reluctantly. “I guess I have too many secret missions to get on your case about this. Go clock in, I can handle the front for a few more minutes. You look like you want to set those napkins down.”

Gretchen had forgotten about the napkins. She stashed them in the break room, buttoned a camp shirt over her t-shirt, and clocked in. Then she set about the normal tasks of a Friday afternoon. 

“Hiya!” Mr. Pineapple greeted her on her way to clean the arcade. “Did you get those napkins? You have the receipt?”

Gretchen patted her pockets. Panic washed over her. “Uh…”

“Don’t stress about it. You can go later.”

“No, I got the napkins, I just.” Gretchen swallowed. There was something _wrong_ in her brain. Missing. “I don’t have the receipt. Maybe it’s in my backpack.”

“Just bring it to my office by the end of the day,” said Mr. Pineapple. “Or else you can fill out an expense report.”

Gretchen proceeded to her task, worrying the whole time. Cleaning the arcade was usually soothing, if a bit spooky even with the lights on. The first thing she did was unplug all the games. She wiped the game cabinet exteriors with rubbing alcohol and a soft rag; checked their interiors for dirt and loose parts; and cleaned the vents, fans, and token dispensers with compressed air. 

Sometimes the interiors needed to be vacuumed, which scared her a little because she didn’t want to break anything. There was one game in particular, _Puzzle Biker_ , that seemed to accrue a bunch of dust every week. Privately, Gretchen didn’t understand why anyone would play _Puzzle Biker_. The game followed a tiny pixel biker on his quest to… well, it was never clear what his quest was, but it involved matching tiles to help him execute trick maneuvers and jump his bike over gaps. The music was discordant, the graphics were hideous, and the gameplay was full of bugs. The final step of cleaning the arcade was playing the games to make sure they worked, and Gretchen almost always had to restart _Puzzle Biker_. It was her least favorite part of a task that she really didn’t mind overall. But today she completed it without feeling the time pass.

Having cleaned the arcade, Gretchen changed to a different camp shirt; checked on Dib, who was renting shoes to a family under Mr. Pineapple’s eye; and transitioned to spraying down the bowling stations. The bachelorettes had hidden trash around their station. Gretchen never understood why people did this. She found a cardboard tray of mini wine bottles under their table, half full, and considered drinking one.

Dib helped the family through their game. Gretchen wiped down the counters and sprayed old shoes. Mr. Pineapple left around the time she started dust-mopping the empty lanes, and she remembered too late that she hadn’t found the receipt. Oh well. Expense report it was.

Gretchen remembered when Dib left. She remembered shooing the family out, closing, and locking up. She did not remember her walk home, or anything that happened before morning.

* * *

At the corner store the following afternoon, Gretchen’s card was declined.

“That’s weird.” She’d only gotten an iced tea.

“Maybe you need to slow down a bit,” suggested the cashier.

“Huh?”

“Wasn’t that you, last night? You bought, like, _all_ of our sour candy.” The cashier nodded towards the relevant display, which was looking a tad bare.

“I think that must have been someone else,” said Gretchen, digging through her backpack for change.

“All right,” said the cashier, unconvinced, watching with judgment as Gretchen counted out dimes.

* * *

  
  


She had forgotten to stock the napkins in the snack bar. Dib was doing it when she walked in. 

“Sorry,” said Gretchen weakly, and: “I got you an iced tea?”

She took the front counter today, because Dib had done it twice in a row and she knew he hated it. Anything that involved talking to people about non-paranormal subjects was not Dib’s forte. She didn’t have a book, so she just stood there and watched the door.

Gaz came and argued with Dib again. She was getting sort of whiny about it, and sloppy in her whininess. Gretchen overheard a snippet of their conversation:

“I told you, Gaz, I’m done with that stuff.”

“Clearly it isn’t done with you. What about the _Earth,_ Dib? Don’t you want to save your precious Earth?”

“Let Zim do it,” said Dib, like it hurt him. A slammed door cut off Gaz’s squawk of outrage. Gretchen considered intervening, but the arrival of some customers distracted her.

The customers were a chatty group, horribly jovial. Once they were set up in their lane, they wanted snacks. Dib was nowhere to be found, so Gretchen went to fetch them herself. 

When she opened the pantry, a wave of elation washed over her. “There are snacks in here,” Gretchen heard herself say, like it was a new discovery. Snacks in the snack bar. Alright. 

She followed appropriate food handling procedures to prepare the customers’ chili dogs, spicy nachos, and ultra spicy nachos, the difference between “spicy” and “ultra spicy” being sriracha plus an extra handful of jalapeno rings. Canned sodas were cracked open and poured over ice. A side order of tater tots was dutifully microwaved. Gretchen served the customers, endured their banter, processed their payments, resolved their remaining questions, and headed back to the snack bar.

An extra large trash bag was in her hands before she knew it. She crammed it full of every sugary food she could find, plus the spray cheese they used for nacho emergencies and a six-pack of grape soda. It was heavy and conspicuous, so she wrestled another trash bag over it to obscure some of the contents. Maybe she could pretend to take it to the dumpster. Yeah, that would work. 

She ran into Dib and Gaz on her way out the back. They were still arguing. 

“Hi!” Gretchen said. “I’m taking this trash out.” She hefted the bag and quickly swung it behind her back. It sloshed. 

Dib said, “Uh, okay.” Gaz narrowed her eyes. 

“Bye!” Gretchen fled.

* * *

Gretchen was about three miles away when Gaz pulled up and cut her off at a cross-signal. Luckily, Gretchen was still on the curb.

Gaz rolled down the window and spoke, heedless of the SUV driver slamming on the horn behind her. “You need to get in the car right now.” Her tone brooked no argument.

“Sorry?” Gretchen blinked stupidly at her. 

“Get in the car.” The passenger side door opened, and a giant metal claw shot out and pulled Gretchen inside. _That_ had never happened before.

“What’s going on?” said Gretchen. The claw re-formed into a seatbelt without a buckle. A smaller claw yanked her bag of snacks into the back seat. She was trapped in Gaz’s car, whose windows had now gone tinted. She wondered if she should feel more frightened. Mostly she just felt sweaty.

“I should be asking you that!” said Gaz. “What are you doing?”

“I’m bringing Tak snacks,” said Gretchen’s mouth. What?

Gaz stared at her. The SUV driver honked again. Someone behind them honked as well. The light was changing.

“Fucking hell,” Gaz said, with an intensity of feeling that Gretchen thought was unwarranted, and hit the gas.


End file.
